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$100 Million Milestone Marks a Win-Win for Customers and Adaptive Insights

As CEO of a company that helps teams manage their business performance, setting goals and tracking KPIs are always top of mind. Accordingly, I’m excited to say that we recently achieved important goals of our own here at Adaptive Insights: We crossed the $100 million threshold for both revenue and annual recurring revenue (ARR) under contract.

These are major milestones not only for us, but for any high-growth company. In fact, fewer than 1% of all cloud companies reach this milestone, as one of our board of directors members, Byron Deeter of Bessemer Venture Partners, noted recently. Byron has helped a number of high-profile software-as-a-service companies achieve success and is one of the leading voices in the industry on building value in software. During a presentation last year, he noted that hitting the $100 million ARR target “takes vision, drive, and a fearless ability to stretch the view of what a company can do.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Rob Hull founded our company with a vision to solve business problems with software—without creating new technology problems for users. Check, mission accomplished. Drive? All of our Adaptive Insights teammates are driven by a singular focus on making our customers successful by delivering great software and meeting and anticipating their needs. As for fearless, that’s something we do each and every day. Whether it’s overcoming a technical challenge, solving a problem, or helping our customers achieve their own goals, I’m proud of how our team stretches to new heights.

Of course, we couldn’t have hit the $100 million mark without the support of our incredible customer community (3,700+ and growing), our partners, our team members, and our investors. Further, our growth affirms that our customers—even those in traditionally conservative finance roles—are open to embracing new processes and technologies, and transforming how they work and contribute value to their organizations.

Fueling greater collaboration between finance and business

Particularly gratifying has been seeing how Adaptive Insights is fueling greater collaboration between finance and the business, with everybody in an organization playing a more active role in planning. The restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s offers a prime example. There, CFO Jim Bell has been able to foster greater collaboration and alignment throughout the business by deploying Adaptive Insights to individual restaurant owners. It’s exciting to see the owners at the hundreds of P.F. Chang’s outlets use the Adaptive Suite to maintain, manage, and report their own P&Ls.

Another example comes from the nonprofit world, where the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society has provided more than 400 managers and employees access to our cloud planning software, empowering people across the organization with the tools they need to improve overall business performance.

These are just two of the many organizations evolving beyond traditional static planning processes and technologies to involve the people closest to their business in order to derive deep insights, make more timely decisions, and build integrated plans. And it also allows finance to play a true strategic role, providing oversight and planning coordination within the functional business while gaining a broad, organizational view of performance.

Building a relevant and enduring company

The commitment to redefining the way business and financial planning are done was one of the key reasons I joined Adaptive Insights three years ago. And it’s why achieving these latest milestones are a credit to everyone associated with our company. Growth is never a straight line. It takes commitment and persistence to work through the knotholes. Having previously reached the $100 million revenue milestone with other software companies such as Apptio, Acquia, Rally, and Rational, I know hitting marks like this one builds not only confidence, but also momentum. There is credibility that comes with these achievements—as well as much-deserved validation for what it takes to become a long-term, relevant company.

We’ve come a long way since Rob set out with his conviction that there had to be a better way for finance to plan, budget, and report. We’ve made huge strides in delivering industry-leading time-to-value for our customers, and helping those customers solve bigger and more complex problems each and every day. We’ve built a remarkable team—or more aptly put, a dynamic ecosystem of employees, partners, customers, and investors.

And we aren’t resting on our laurels. We cultivate a culture of continuous improvement, always seeking ways we can better serve our ecosystem. We strive to be a leader among the new breed of cloud companies that are changing the way work gets done. We know that executing on our vision requires a maniacal focus on our customers and our team. And we aim to maintain that focus as we move into the new year and beyond.

After all, the key metrics that matter the most to us are the ones that measure our customers’ satisfaction and success.